Featured in Architecture & Design

Monal Daxini presents a blueprint for streaming data architectures and a review of desirable features of a streaming engine. He also talks about streaming application patterns and anti-patterns, and use cases and concrete examples using Apache Flink.

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Joy Gao talks about how database streaming is essential to WePay's infrastructure and the many functions that database streaming serves. She provides information on how the database streaming infrastructure was created & managed so that others can leverage their work to develop their own database streaming solutions. She goes over challenges faced with streaming peer-to-peer distributed databases.

News

There is an evolution going on in testing. It used to be that testing was about confirming to the specification. Testers were often brought in too late and had too little influence, but that is changing now as Cirilio Wortel explained in his talk on the evolution of software testing.

Microsoft increased its foothold in the data science community last winter by acquiring Revolution Analytics, a major provider of software and services based on the open-source R project for computational statistics. The deal is expected to bring R capabilities to the Microsoft suite of products and facilitate the adoption of R-based solutions in the enterprise environment.

An alarming study by Flyvbjerg and Budzier published in the Harvard Business Review has made everyone stand-up and take notice. The coherent advice being that IT projects are much more riskier than we think.

jStat is a JavaScript library providing developers with statistical functions and the ability to plot graphics from within the browser. jStat can be used for statistical operations on all browsers without any external dependencies, and it requires jQuery and the flot plug-in for plotting data. jStat is a partial port of R - an open source statistical language and environment-.

FlightCaster recently open sourced Crane, a tool for distributing and remotely controlling Clojure instances, currently specialized for EC2. Incanter is a Clojure library and tool that makes R-like statistical computations easy with Clojure. Also: the build and dependency management tool Leiningen 1.0 is now available.

Wakoopa, a new start-up based in Amsterdam, Holland, has created a new social network aimed at discovering and sharing what applications people are using. While its user base is relatively small and geek oriented, the network provides useful insight on software usage with a social twist.

VersionOne, a maker of agile project management tools, has announced that the third annual 'State of Agile Development' survey is open for participation. The online survey is intended to gauge the value of agile development practices in the field. Results will be announced on August 4th, at the Agile 2008 conference in Toronto.

Return on Investment is a critical factor for decision making pertaining to following a particular software development practice. The post summarizes the ROI benefits of Agile and the inexpensive practices which lead to highest return on investment.

In February 2008, Dr. Dobb's conducted a survey on Agile adoption and the success rate of Agile software development. The survey revealed some interesting results on various parameters, including: adoption, scalability, iteration length, and team location.

This recent inquiry, by InfoQ China editor Jacky Li, looked at five very different cases of Scrum adoption in China, which got different results. He asked: Why did you use Scrum? How did you adopt it? What problems did you encounter, and why did it succeed or fail? Despite the small sample size, it's an interesting comparison, pointing out that improvement doesn't ensure success.

Analysis of a recent study by the National Research Council of Canada's Institute of Technology into Test Driven Development turned up some interesting observations regarding the value that this approach adds, including whether, in fact, it adds any more value to the quality process than testing after development.

A recent Gartner report on the gender gap in IT states that although many feel that women are "innately better suited than men" to navigate the new global economy, they are not choosing to enter IT - and some are leaving. Gartner predicts that by 2012, 40% of women in the IT workforce will leave traditional IT career paths.

Over 700 IT managers responded to the 2007 Network Computing Readers' Survey, many of whom reported frustration with the internal strife and snake-oil salesmanship of technology vendors. Respondents recommended that vendors stop "promising capabilities that aren't there", and "address actual business problems, rather than chasing buzzwords."